Altilium starts construction of major battery recycling plant in southern England

Altilium has started construction of its electric vehicle battery recycling plant with integrated chemical refining capacity in Plymouth. The ACT 3 scale-up plant will be able to recycle batteries from around 24,000 electric vehicles per year.

The British battery materials and recycling company only started processing lithium-ion battery waste at its ACT 2 recycling plant in Plymouth at the beginning of December. In this ‘scale-up plant,’ Altilium’s EcoCathode process is being tested and validated by its automotive partners. For the sake of completeness, ACT 1 is the name given to Altlilum’s technology centre in Devon, where the EcoCathode process was developed.

With the ‘scale-up plant’ ACT 3, the construction of which has now begun, Altilium wants to take its own processes to the next level, namely as a large-scale recycling plant. The next stage, ACT4 as a ‘mega refinery,’ is already being planned for the end of the decade (where battery metal salts and cathode active material are to be produced), but is not yet being realised.

ACT 3 is different, however, as construction work on the 1.6-hectare site has already begun, according to the press release. Altilium hopes that the plant will provide “important learnings around materials handling, scalability and process optimisation, as well as sustainability and environmental compliance, as part of a clear scale-up pathway for construction of Altilium’s planned ACT 4 mega-scale refinery later this decade.” Using the EcoCathode process, the battery scrap is recycled into nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) and lithium sulphate, which Altilium describes as “critical intermediate materials for domestic production of battery cathodes.”

Altilium also has facilities for hydrometallurgical recycling – one of the first companies in the UK to do so. “While battery recycling in the UK has to date focused primarily on shredding batteries and black mass production, Altilium is pioneering the next step: keeping valuable battery metals like lithium and nickel in the UK through advanced hydrometallurgical refining. This approach ensures local job creation and a resilient supply of battery-grade materials for the UK’s growing EV and gigafactory sectors,” writes Altilium. Until now, recycling companies in the UK have only dismantled and mechanically crushed the batteries, but the hydrometallurgical processing took place outside the British Isles, and the materials would have had to be re-imported.

“Our ACT 3 site marks the next phase in Altilium’s mission to close the loop on battery materials here in Britain. We are proud to be building this scale-up facility here in Plymouth, which will be a cornerstone of the UK’s EV battery supply chain,” says Christian Marston, COO of Altilium. “This is about taking a strategic and incremental approach to scaling a vital new industry, one that ensures value stays in the country and creates long-term skilled green jobs.”

altilium.tech